The Mystery of the RNC's Vanishing Donors

National Republicans can't even get the easy stuff right.

The Republican National Committee is having money problems, and it’s a complete mystery why. From the Washington Post:

The Republican National Committee disclosed that it had $9.1 million in cash on hand as of Oct. 30, the lowest amount for the RNC in any Federal Election Commission report since February 2015. That compares with about $20 million at the same point in the 2016 election cycle and about $61 million four years ago, when Trump was in the White House.

The Democratic National Committee reported having $17.7 million as of Oct. 30, almost twice as much as the Republican Party, with one year before the election.

“It’s a revenue problem,” Tennessee RNC member Oscar Brock said. “We’re going through the same efforts we always go through to raise money: the same donor meetings, retreats, digital advertising, direct mail. But the return is much lower this year. If you know the answer, I’d love to know it. The staff has managed to tighten down on expenses to keep the party from going into the red.”

Donors have not cut as many large checks to the RNC in recent years, and the party’s small-dollar program has also suffered, according to people familiar with the party’s finances, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal party details. Some donors aren’t giving to the RNC because they think that will help Trump, which they don’t want to do, these people said, while others have said they prefer to wait until 2024 to give. Some have grown frustrated with the party’s leadership, people close to major donors said.

The party cut certain expenditures this year after projected money did not come in, according to people familiar with the decisions.

Donald Trump’s chosen RNC chair, Ronna [Romney] McDaniel, is quoted pulling the expected nothing-to-see-here bit, insisting that donors are focused on supporting individual candidates at the moment and committee contributions will resume once a presidential nominee is settled. Others aren’t so sure:

“The RNC’s electoral record since 2017 speaks for itself,” said Virginia RNC member Patti Lyman, who opposed McDaniel when she was elected to another term in January. “The damage from that chair election goes far beyond the drop in donations. Our base was demoralized.”

When Laura Ingraham highlighted the story on Twitter Monday morning, she was ratioed with commentary pointing out that maybe, just maybe, people are not interested in donating money to an organization that before the primary redirected so much of it to the legal bills of a billionaire whose original sales pitch was that his wealth meant he wouldn’t need financial aid, and which will resume doing so if said billionaire becomes the nominee. Or in supporting a party apparatus so closely associated with a nauseating loser who helped tank critical elections and just won’t go away.

All of that is true as far as it goes, and it goes quite far. But it doesn’t go all the way. Trump’s takeover of the GOP is the biggest symptom of the problem, but it’s not the root—Trump was able to sweep in and assert dominance because the party was already an untrustworthy, ineffectual mess that drove the grassroots into the arms of the first guy who made a halfway-plausible show of at least being different. And rather than shaping up the party, he left it as untrustworthy and ineffectual as ever.

So no discussion of donor aversion to the RNC is complete without the simple fact that donors (at least the ones with loftier goals than buying influence) don’t see Republicans doing anything of value with their money, has been a constant since long before Trump.

To that end, I thought I’d take this column as an opportunity to get the ball rolling on some brainstorm on things Republicans could be doing that would be more productive—and visible—than getting into the debate-management business and making a mess of it.

Inspiration struck the other night upon seeing a tweet from Cassie Smedile Docksey of right-wing credit card outfit Coign. She revealed that the District of Columbia had called her for jury duty, and denied her request to be excused even though she’s pregnant and her baby is due to be born three days before the trial starts. “But please, preach to me again about Democrat run cities supporting women and maternal health,” Docksey wrote.

This is just one anecdote from one far-left city. Imagine if the Republican Party put time and effort into collecting stories like this from every Democrat stronghold and putting them in front of voters. Show and tell the public exactly what life is really like when Democrats have total control. Make the contrast and consequences real to people.

This sort of thing would not require wading into any of the Right’s messier philosophical divisions, crossing any of its warring factions, or sorting out the RNC’s deeper structural problems. It’s so mind-numbingly simple that it is beyond political malpractice that the GOP doesn’t have persistent ad campaigns dedicated to it. Yet by and large, this party has never used any of its most potent material to anywhere near its maximum potential.

It didn’t shove federal, state, or local Covid tyranny down Democrats’ throats (presumably because that would also implicate Republicans’ current presumptive standard-bearer). It doesn’t brand Democrats with the deterioration of core police functions, streets turned into toilets, collapse of basic education standards, or child exposure to pornographic material that define leftist governance. When the racists of Black Lives Matter launched a systemic blood libel of America’s police officers, their instinct was to push a diet version of Democrats’ police “reform” ideas rather than simply point out that almost every police killing of an unarmed black person BLM was screaming about took place in a mismanaged Democrat city (and this was after Republicans had already bent over backwards to prove their sensitivity by releasing a bunch of violent felons).

The Republican National Committee can’t show backbone or courage enough to sever ties with cancerous political figures, but it also can’t muster the initiative to do what ought to be the easy stuff. The real mystery shouldn’t be why they’re losing donors; it should be who on earth is still opening their wallets for this bunch.